People are picking up on our two beta releases (”picking up” is quite an understatement, actually!) and we’ve made a headline post on GigaOm with our Mobile Beta. If you haven’t signed up already for our first beta round, you better hurry up! The first round is closing much sooner then even we expected…

Today the MSN network was experiencing connectivity problems. You may have noticed you could not login to the eBuddy MSN service for a few hours, and you may have noticed our website was loading slow at times.

Here’s some more background on what happened. Usually when MSN is down, you cannot login to MSN through eBuddy either. But lots of people will try anyways, which results in a huge spike of logins on our servers. Because of this our webservers were having a hard time keeping up.

In the event this occurs a next time, if you have any suggestions on how best to inform you of this, please let us know. Off course we will remain to do our best to provide you with the best service we can.

It all started last year September 2006. I just returned from an internship in Perth, Australia and was looking for a graduation assignment. I spent a month searching high and low for a company that could offer me a graduation assignment.
One day by chance I came across eBuddy whilst chatting to a friend. I read they offered internships and so a quick phone call, several emails and two meetings later I found myself sitting behind a desk at eBuddy HQ. Things went fast and within the first week I was up to speed about the company and what needed to be done.

My graduation assignment was to make a communication plan and matrix for 2007. The company had been growing so fast that many things weren’t documented properly, especially in communication. My task was to provide a clear overview of how and what we should communicate with you, the user.

I wanted to graduate in February but things did not work out as planned. I became so involved with eBuddy because there was so much that needed to be done. After meeting with my graduation supervisor, I took a step back from work and bit by bit I pieced together a graduation report. The report is now complete and the last hurdle I have left is presenting and defending my graduation assignment. After that I’ll be graduated and done

My time at eBuddy has been a great learning curve for me, I’m glad to see that the things I planned in my report are being implemented. It’s really satisfying to know and see that my contribution has brought about change and did help make a difference.

Working for a start-up like eBuddy is different than working for a multinational because the work is much more hands-on and you learn a lot in the process. I don’t have to write reports which end up in a file cabinet. The freedom to express my thoughts and ideas has enabled me to fully develop myself within the company. What touches me the most is having so many new friends and being part of a team. Going out for drinks or having lunch together has always been fun and that’s what I really like about eBuddy. There’s still plenty to be done so as of next week eBuddy will be the first company I will be working for. Thank you JJ and everyone who has helped make this possible!

If you’re looking for a challenge and want to do work that does make a difference, eBuddy might be what you’re looking for. The hands-on work brings a truck load of lessons and experiences. So just like I once did give it a shot and find out for yourself!

Best,

Rick

After being on the road and (too) busy in the office I finally have some time for my first blogpost. In the first week of March we attended Adtech in Paris. Arthur drove down a car with our booth to this new eBuddy rising Country.

France is our number 5 country, up from 15 a year ago, so we thought it would be good to exhibit at an advertiser conference. This exhausting event (day and night ) was a big success. The advertisements you see on eBuddy help us to make some money to keep offering the free eBuddy service and develop cool new features!! If you know anyone who would be interested to advertise (usually bigger companies) please mail our sales people: advertising[at]ebuddy.com.

After this event I flew to San Francisco to have interviews for our new US office. Yes, after our Amsterdam and London office it looks like our third one will be in “the bay area”, close to some of the biggest internet companies: Google, eBay, Yahoo, Facebook etc.

In the meantime our Amsterdam employees stayed in the office day-and-night to make sure we can deliver you our new eBuddy messenger in the next months. Please be patient, more news on this soon!

If you are interested to test with us please add: ebuddybeta@hotmail.com to your buddy list. You might be one of the first 1000 people to use the new eBuddy.

On March 19th was announced in Cannes, France we made the Top 100 of European private companies by Red Herring!! see announcement here.

Finally Saturday we closed this great March month with some great record numbers: over 10M unique visitors and almost 20 billion minutes of online time, up 145% from last year. It was an unbelievable March month, curious what April has in mind for us………

You may have already noticed, the MSN version of eBuddy is available in various languages. A big thank you goes out to all the translators, who helped with the translations, or those who reviewed them.

To change your language, go to Settings and select your preferred language on the ‘General’ tab. After saving, the application will reload in the new language. Don’t worry - the language you selected is used the next time you log on to eBuddy.

Is your language not listed, or do you see incorrect translations?
We can always use some more help, please leave your name, email and language at feedback@ebuddy.com and we will let you know how you can contribute to the translations.

We won’t be asking for much of your time translating - but just a few remarks (to feedback@ebuddy.com) about incorrect translations are always more than welcome!

One of the fun things with working at eBuddy is that we are a global company. Our users are literally in every nook and cranny of this planet.

Take a look at this Technorati feed I’m watching.

Looks like I will need to brush up on my Arabic and Chinese skills! (Or maybe that is Hebrew and Japanese?)

We’re on a roll here at eBuddy, picking up award after award. After recently snapping up the Web 2.0 Award, we are now one of the Red Herring Europe 100 winners. Even though we have been on the cover of Red Herring before, we wouldn’t mind showing up there again. This award is not for techno-cool, but rather for proper business skills.

Red Herring’s editorial staff rigorously evaluated more than 700 private companies by carefully analysing financial data and subjective criteria, including quality of the management team, strategy execution, and dedication to research and development.

Ebuddy is joined on the shortlist by other cool companies such as Joost, Th!nk and CCP Games to name just a few.

Congratulations to all the other companies who made the shortlist, maybe we’ll see you in Cannes!

We have many people working in the eBuddy HQ in Amsterdam. Some are full-time employees while others are interns. As one of the fastest growing startups in this space we have many challenging problems we encounter daily. As you can see on our jobs page; we are constantly looking for talented people to join the team.

While studying Computer Science or Marketing, what would be cooler then doing an internship for one of the hottest companies in the technology space?

So, don’t hesitate and send us your resume for one of our vacancies and become part of our family!

Whoohoo! The blog is live. To celebrate, here is a lovely supersize picture to plunk on your desktop!

To make sure it looks good, select “Centered” as the scaling option.